Central Market

This guide to Central Market in Kuala Lumpur opens in 1983, when developers had plans to clear this Art Deco building for hotels and offices and a heritage group's counter-proposal to save it as a national art gallery was turned down. It traces the building's roots to a wet market operating here since 1888 and the market hall raised in 1937 under the Kuala Lumpur Sanitary Board, and follows the unlikely turn that let the structure stand. Look around at the batik, woodcarvings and silver jewellery filling the stalls today.